“Its not about you, it’s about THE RANGES STUPID!”

The drop line is important to remember, and hopefully I don’t ramble too much and get back to it. There has been a lot written in posts, magazines, blogs, and bathroom walls about the statistical variance, psychology and rights of passage about downswings. All will provide more insight than this rag.

All regular poker players have downswings and know how suffocating they feel. They all take a toll on your BR, and your mind. What is also harmful about downswings is how they can affect your poker play, if you ONLY believe it is caused by statistical variance. You can start to enter a dangerous mental state where you try to “mix things up”, or worst yet you don’t objectively look at your own play and places for improvements.

There are a lot of hands besides the 100BB+ pots that you could be improving on, such as thin value bets, missed steal attempts, bad bluffs, folding earlier, squeezing etc. that if you focus only on the coolers/bad beats, you will not come out of your downswing until you get a variance play in the other direction. Instead you should be looking at all aspects of your game and trying to squeeze every bit of value out of it.

When evaluating your play in specific, it shouldn’t be about your holding against their holdings, but about villain’s range against your perceived range. Ranges should never be “1 hand”, but logical holdings given a players tendency and the action line. Also look at all your difficult decisions, and go back earlier in the hand and see if a different course of play (logical course of play, no “I should just open shove with AA next time” could have made the hand easier to play.

Here are some common quotes that people say during their downswings, that are not “I run bad”, that could lead to tragic play and some counter thoughts a player should be thinking if playing well.

“Everytime I cbet (2nd barrel), they call me with air or 3rd pair” – Why are you 2nd barreling with air against them? Do you have a read? Just value bet your made hands. (It’s about the Ranges!)

‘They keep 3betting my raises, why do they keep picking on me?” Why do you think they are picking on you and not playing their cards? If you KNOW they are 3barrelling light, then look’em up, if you have no reason to not believe them, then fold. (It’s about the Ranges!)

“Everytime, I cbet they call, and when I have a hand they Fold!! Can everyone see my cards?” Unless you play Absolute Poker, the answer is probably “No”. This is a common feeling during a downswing, and can lead players to do bad, bad things. If its just “them” and not a particular player, the answer is probably statistical variance, and you should not be playing back at them, or changing your staring requirements, etc. Just take it like a poker player What you should do is review you hands, and see if you have polarized your range at all, (merging your range is important) and make sure you are playing your cbets the same as your made hands (especially your monsters, HU at least).

“Everyone at the table is making moves at me.” No one at the poker table cares about your downswing, and if you are playing your solid game, they don’t “smell blood”. Just hang in their and observe the action. If you still believe they are singling you out, look around for a reason to stay at the table, (also known as “ID the fish”, if you can’t find one, its probably you, and if you are not a fish; Why are you at the table with no fish?). If you feel hopeless at a table, find a better table. You don’t need to prove to the other players you are a good poker player. If you are convinced that everyone is singling you out, switch limits, playing times, sites, sn, etc. If it is still happening, get a coach and look at your game.

When we are playing well, it feels like the other players have their cards face up. That is because poker is about the ranges, and when you are on your game in determining ranges, then 95% of the game seems easy. When are buried in a downswing, typically your ranges start to narrow, and you start to “hope” players don’t have cards instead of going through the thought process.

Here are a few suggestions (guidelines) that I recommend a struggling uNL player when they need to break out of a downswing and regain their confidence:

1) Game select. No shame in playing for easy money.
2) Focus on the simple things.
3) Tighten up your range in the first 3 seats.
4) Believe players are ABC until they give you a reason not too. This should be street specific, players can be loose pre, but slow down quickly when met with resistance on the flop, and vise versa. Be aware when the play opposite of what you think.
5) Don’t call a flop bet if you can’t call a PSB on a brick turn.
6) Stop bluffing bricks
7) Don’t cbet multiway OOP.
8) Make a mental plan on every single player at the table. Determine what they will stack off with. Such as “will stack off with TPTK”, this should put a mental note that is okay to commit with an overpair. “Stacks off with an overpair”, two pair can be played fast against them. Adjust these notes constantly. This will make you figure out a plan for winning their stacks, and keep you from getting your self in –EV situations. (since you shouldn’t be stacking off with TPTK to a person that will only stack off in “set over set”). Which leads to…..
9) Focus on winning stacks, not pots. Hand values change throughout the course of a hand and sessions. AK is great preflop against a 20BB SS, but not so great post flop on an Axx board to a solid player 300BB deep.
10) Don’t worry about being drawn out on, just determine if you are ahead or behind and proceed accordingly.
11) Vbet thin on the river.
12) Know where your money is coming from. Both from a particular player, and during a hand, what hands will pay you off.

Good luck at the tables!

Super wonderful amazing post. I wish I could steal it!

I particularly love 5 and 6.

8 and 9 deserve their own posts imo (for Poo-Bah, maybe).

nh sir

This guy is on my TEAM!! FEAR IT!!!!!!

I'll come back and read this when I have a spare 3 hours. Your team is still going down!

I was about to make a post along those lines. So I'll take the liberty of adding a few thoughts.

Importantly, you need to be the one who's getting into the villain's head, not the other way around.

And like Sammy says: ID the fish. There's nothing wrong with having sat down at a table, in a bad seat, where, almost purely due to the the dynamics of the game already in progress, you are the fish. Like being the ******* in the card game "President" you shouldn't take it too personally. Heck, maybe the guy who was there before you spewed his chips away and no one has even noticed you're not that same guy. But once you realize that you can't get any traction at a table, you are free to get up and leave.

This took me forever to learn. So so important, they're most likely not playing back at you, they're just turning up with cards.

I'd say that at 25NL and below if people are constantly raising you, 3betting you etc, they most probably have it every time. At 50NL you might be at the wrong table, especially if you're being harassed every time you make an LP raise.

But mostly, remember you only have a paltry amount invested even after a c-bet. I don't know how many times I've spewed off money calling down light or through major FPS just because I was on some minor downswing or couple thousand hand breakeven stretch, only to bounce back like an hour later and then regret how much I could have been up if I would have just stuck to my guns during the rough patch.

Solid post Sammy

nh Sammy.

Can't be said enough: there's more to how you run than the cards you have and how they flop; your opponents' cards are a big part of it too. Once I realized this, getting raised when I had great preflop hands that turned into middling postflop hands had nothing to do with people playing back at me and everything to do with them simply flopping a better hand.

Nice one Sammy.

This OP flopped awesome!

lol it's catching on!

Very nice post sammy!

Great post Sammy. Thanks, and I know if I got a couple things out of it then beginners will find this like the bible. lol

Good post but if confidence needs to be regained, vbetting thin on the river might not be a good idea.

This is an excellent post, Sammy. I saw so much of myself in this post because of my current downswing.

I have a few things to add/elaborate on. As I said, I have been on a prolonged downswing, which I knew had affected the quality of my play. So last night I got on FT and decided no matter what, I was going to play my A game. After about 200 hands, I had lost with AA, KK, QQ twice, top set once, had whiffed AK maybe 5 or 6 times in a row, and was down $200. I was pissed off, but still thought I was playing pretty well.

Then I get dealt AQs in UTG+1 200bb deep. UTG (30/22/8) limps, i raise, folded around to UTG who calls. Limp call, ldo--small pocket pair, easy game.

Flop is KJ5r. I see only one small card, think, "he whiffed, I'm firing." he checks, I bet, he raises. I actually lol, I say, "yeah, rep that set buddy" and insta-call, planning to take the pot away on the turn. On the turn brick, he bets $20 at the $44 pot, and I raise it up to $66. he tanks and calls. Thankfully, his turn call finally got through to me and when he checked the river I meekly checked behind and, of course, a set of fives beats ace high.

It's all about the ranges. I SAW his limp/call preflop, properly interpreted it as a small pocket pair, SAW that he check/raised the flop, but refused to slow down and actually consider that, yes, he actually had flopped the set he was repping. Why? because this was about the 4th flopped set I had run into in 200 hands, and I just refused to believe that, yes, they are all playing their cards against me and they are all flopping monsters.

I never realized I was tilting until he called the turn raise.

The story has a moderately happy ending--down $280 after that fiasco, I buckled down and reminded myself that variance includes running into lots of monsters in a short timeframe. I told myself to play my regular game, avoid big fancy plays, and just grind. It worked. I played another 800 hands or so, and, without ever winning a pot greater than $15, I made back $140--I stole blinds, I bet draws out of the blinds in limped pots, I 3 bet a bit light out of the BB the most aggressive button stealers, I checked behind otb with a ragged ace on an ace high flop, picking up the villain's turn bet. I played my A small ball game and made good money without ever winning a big pot.

I took away two lessons from that:

1. the small things matter a lot, if they happen frequently.
2. when you are in a big hole, you can't sit back and wait for the big score. You have to get in there and pick up small pots. It seemed unfair--I lost $280 in maybe 6 or 7 big hands, and had to grind like crazy for 800 hands to get back half of it. But variance doesn't care about fair, and you have to do what you have to do to grind out of a downswing, whether you caused it (as I did) or not.

I think vbetting thin on the river is something so many uNL players don't do NEARLY enough. Just a few successful river vbets in decent sized pots can offset one of those big coolers/bad beats that hit you while running bad. So often players tend to be just happy checking it down and playing it safe, but in the long run are leaving so much value behind.

Nice post Sammy.

OP: Pure gold.


Also:

^ Repeat that line to yourself ten times out loud and I guarantee your profit will go up immediately. Well said

NH Sammy.

When a downswing hits, we are indeed very quick to toss it all on variance. But a sick swing is more than variance giving us the middle finger - it's a good spot to see what we should fix in our game. I'm quoting myself from an older thread, where similar issues were discussed:

[In reference to a 11k hand schwong I had]
Quite frankly I believe that about 25% of a downswing is variance, 25% is it excarberating our bad play and/or leaks, and the rest is the net result of the first two having an effect on our psyche. So when a swing hits you in the face, it may be high time to review your play. I certainly did.

After all, anyone can win stacks when the cards are in their favor. We see it happen every week, when a pack of donkeys are throwing their chips around and hitting every possible draw to add yet another stack to their already massive pile of chips. Skill has next to nothing to do with that.

Instead, it takes a lot of skill to balance and dampen the effects of a bad stretch. Like mpethy said, lots of small things accumulate. You may not win a stack for hundreds or even a couple of thousand hands, but at the same time all those <35bb pots you collected with your good hands can make up for it. After all, there is no shame in winning a pot without showdown.

Thanks very much for this, the checklist has formed the first page of my 'King Spew Bible'!

Great post Sammy.

# 5 alone has made a huge difference in my game when you posted this a couple of months ago.

One thing that has helped me with confidence in a downswing is really drop down in level (at least 2, 3 or more is better) and play a session. For me at least, I leave a level when I believe I'm one of the better players. When you go back, it is like they are playing with their cards up. It reminds you how much you have learned since then and that you are improving.

This thread needs to be stickied!

Good post !

I am actually in a little downswing at the moment but i lose less then before because i just keep on playing my game
I know for sure a month a go i would have lost 8 buy ins by now, but now i am 'only' down 4 buy ins

Hehe, am on my first massive downswing at 25NL and recognize alot. Especially the part about starting to think that other players see my cards. I can't remember the last time a big hand paid off and I'm definitly getting paranoid. No idea what to do about it though :-)

Alot of really good stuff in this thread. One other thing that I think is very important is to stop thinking of winning as inherently "good" or losing as "bad". You can be playing terribly and still win and you can play perfectly and still lose. I'm guilty of this all the time but it's something I'm working on. For instance, when I've been winning alot of times I'll stop reviewing my sessions because "I must be playing well...I'm up x amount of buyins." When in reality, I could (and undoubtedly am) playing far from optimally and not winning the maximum...something I might have seen if I stuck to my routine of reviewing my play.

Conversely, when I'm losing and just can't stop losing (like I am right now), I'll start in with all the "I'm the worst player ever...I'm the unluckiest player ever...I'm cursed...I'll never win again" BS. Many times when I'm feeling this way, I'll look over my sessions and realize that most of my losses came from pots where I was a huge favorite and just got bad beated. Of course, I'm still making mistakes but I'm not nearly the donk that I think I am. We all play poker to get the money in with +EV edges. But I believe the true sign that you've evolved into a real "poker player" is when you start to take satisfaction in getting the money in as a favorite and completely disregard the results. So if you get AA in vs KK and get sucked out on...you are pleased with yourself and don't even blink at the chips going the other way. This is what I'm working towards and it ain't easy by any means.

Poker can *$&# with you like nothing else. It can turn otherwise well adjusted, healthy people into completely neurotic messes. I've been a lifelong athlete and went as far as the collegiate level. Still run marathons and road races year round. I bounce back from disappointment with the best of them. Always ready to tackle the next challenge. But I'll lose 6-8 buyins at poker and it can put me in a funk for days. No explanation for it. The stakes I play (NL50) don't even mean anything to my financial well-being. The game can just wear you down if you don't learn to disassociate your results from your own self worth.

Sorry this was rambling and disjointed but it's nice to talk to a sympathetic audience.

very nice reaction

wow good post why do you play miccrostakes